regarding the Guiliani speech

I started listening to the full speech and, by about 7 minutes in, my stomach began to turn. By this point in his speech, Rudy Guiliani hadn’t even begun to explore policy. No, he had spent the first two minutes trying to be funny, the next few singing the same praises we’ve heard about John McCain, which naturally led him to begin bashing Barack Obama. Speaking at the RNC, this is to be expected, and hell, accepted.

The thing that made me cringe in disgust and anger, however, was the arrogant – and dare i say, hateful – marginalization of community and community organizing. To me, Mr. Guiliani’s spiteful sneers and the crowd’s even more repugnant mockery by which he was flanked, served as a damning indictment of how out of touch the party is with “the people.”

Without community organizing, what are everyday people supposed to do when the political machine is broken, blind and deaf to their very real needs?

Without community organizing, how can those who pull the levers and flip the switches of the machine be kept even remotely accountable?

Without community organizing, how is the everyday, everywhere American supposed to change his and her world more often than once every four novembers?

Ex-mayor of New York City, Mr. Guiliani, without community organizing, how desolate, hopeless, and demoralized would your city have been following that fateful day you can’t help but mention in every speech?

I’m shocked and dismayed at this shrugging off of the rest of us who don’t hold office, who don’t have the money to throw at people who don’t need any more of, who are tired of waiting for ballots to cast.

I haven’t written this to condemn John McCain by association (though it’s tempting). I haven’t written this to support Barack Obama (which I do). I’ve written this simply to express my grief at this dismissal off of the American public and its beautiful, unique rights to organize, act, and above all, change.